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While most people think of wildfires as a Western phenomenon, events this year have pointed out that the Southeast is also an area that is ripe for wildfires. An recent article by Lyndsey Gilpin at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-southeast-is-becoming-a-wildfire-hotspot/ describes the increases in wildfires in the Southeast over time. The article discusses whether wildfires are becoming more frequent and…
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The welcome rain in the past week helped reduce the worst drought in the Southeast, although the overall area of dry conditions did not change. Just like the drought status is slow to worsen when we are going into a drought, the Drought Monitor authors remove drought slowly until it is clear that we have…
Posted in: Drought -
The National Weather Service noted that new experimental snowfall maps will be available this year for a number of stations across the US, including several in the Southeast. The new maps will show ranges of potential snowfall as well as probabilities of different amounts. That could provide some very useful additional information to what is…
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The web site Adventures in Mapping shows a new drought map for the Southeast which captures the complexity of the current (fortunately waning) drought in our region using colored dots to represent drought intensity and frequency. You can read more about it and find a link to explain how they made the map at https://adventuresinmapping.com/2016/12/06/six-months-of-drought-in-the-american-southeast/.
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With the early formation of Hurricane Alex in mid-January and the appearance of Hurricane Otto in Central America on Thanksgiving this year, you could ask if the Atlantic hurricane season is getting longer. Fortunately, Ryan Truchelut analyzed the trends in the season and published the results in a recent Capital Weather Gang posting. While the…
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Chris Mooney of the Washington Post discussed the latest observations of sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic in a recent article which you can read here. Contrary to slowly increasing levels of sea ice in the Antarctic Ocean, this year the sea ice extent there dropped precipitously. Since ice extent in the Arctic…
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Seth Borenstein of AP reported today on a new study published in Nature Climate Change that projects at least a fivefold increase in downpours in the Gulf Coast, Atlantic Coast and Southwest. The results of the study using a high-resolution computer model which can resolve smaller scale weather like thunderstorms shows that heavy rains are likely…